


Close Your Eyes and Promise You'll Dream of Me

by MadDub



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Aging, Angst, Death from Old Age, Everyone is a Horndog, F/F, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Immortality, M/M, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 18:44:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2517953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadDub/pseuds/MadDub
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat was there for the birth of the universe, and he was there for the death of his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Close Your Eyes and Promise You'll Dream of Me

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I know I was _supposed_ to be working on a Silence update but I kinda was in a weird mood at midnight and I vomited this out and I liked it. So. Here it is.
> 
> This isn't actually too much sadstuck. Just a little bit there at the end . . . And maybe some at the beginning.

The creation of your worlds was quicker than expected, but slower than you hoped. Kanaya hung the seeds of your universe within the darkness of space, stars glittering and burning alive all around, and while Feferi and Eridan helped Kanaya conceive the fruit that was to be, Equius and Vriska darted through the galaxy blacking out or stealing solar light too close to the system fattening before you.

Tavros blessed all the worlds with Breath as they came to bear the very dregs of the life Feferi gifted unto them; Aradia established neat streams of time to flow betwixt and unique to them all, a chaotic assembly of ticking and age the rest of you would never understand. Sollux came forth to grant the world advancement through ideals and death, balancing the ripening orbs and their birthing cultures. When the first humanoids rose, you kissed them with your own present, that of emotional unity, family ties through blood and connection through similarities, whether physical or otherwise. Nepeta took your present and polished it with her sharpened claws, allowing the simplistic species love of all kinds, though her advancement brought forth a kink you knew must exist but grimaced at nonetheless: many would be separated by the unchangeable mechanics of their own biology.

It was a terrible curse to raise on these poor creatures, and you could tell from the look on her face she wished she wouldn’t have given them a spectrum to range emotion on, but what was done was done.

When the planets began to rotate and the various species set up towns, Terezi organized a system of the most democratic and brutal forms of justice and politics, giving all the title of “the punishment must fit the crime” where all individuals had a slightly different opinion on how severe said crime was. Not to be outdone, Vriska returned with the brightest gem of light held in her pale claws, and with a smirk, she fixed it right in the center of it all to shine glorious and pretty onto all of your worlds, establishing a link for them all.

Equius countered her gift by placing small, smooth rocks around the planets, rocks that orbited slowly but surely across the surface, taking with it a great shadow much like a curtain, and to this, Equius proudly told you all that he had given these planets the concept of “night” in order to rest from the unrelenting prettiness of Vriska’s allowance.

It was a clever idea, and you told him as much. He sweated and thanked you with a bit too much bowing.

Gamzee was the last to go. You thought he tried to begift the tiny peoples with recreation and creativity, and while he did certainly deliver that unto them, he stumbled, and when he did, madness and violence slipped through his slender fingers and dove fast into your planets. Another curse to add to your worlds, another that could upset the delicate balance and careful peace you had all worked so hard to set up.

If you were truthful, you would admit to being frustrated with him. However, the other looked miserable enough that you simply huffed, clapped him on the shoulder, and told him not to worry about it anymore. What was done, as you had already said, was done.

The foundations and principles of your new worlds were now set, so for the time being you retreated to your shared kingdom of gold and violet to relax and watch as your solar system expanded and aged like twelve bottles of different wine. Each was unique to the next, each planet reflecting your personality and domain, and while the knowledge of who owned each never left anyone’s mind, you all collectively shared and cared for the peoples and lands, tenderly nurturing them all to adulthood.

They ripened fast, their citizens faster. Generations birthed and died, laws were added and taken down, the crowns changed heads and the species evolved and learned to create their own languages.

Observation made you learn them too, and learn them all. It was easy enough to slip into the native tongue of any area, but still, you kept a distant watch on everything, not daring to yet visit the new places you had helped to create. Instead, you looked on as they bloomed and changed through sweeps or years or decades.

Eventually, Feferi decided enough was enough, and she descended to her planet.

You stayed unmoved in your golden chamber of light and luxury as she stepped into the vibrantly green world hosting her squishy pink peoples, all of which greeted her with bows and smiles and hugs that had Feferi sniffling and pink-eyed. Eridan narrowed his eyes as she played with wrigglers and waggled her fingers at ugly worm-like grubs, and Kanaya bit her lip as Feferi lunged into a sparkling lake with a few young men and women and swam around. Terezi crossed her arms and Nepeta giggled as Feferi met a girl with wild black hair and glasses, and Equius sniffed unhappily when Feferi’s cheeks colored and she asked the young girl to follow her home.

All of you looked away from the pair as they returned, the girl staring at everything wide-eyed and awed, but Feferi gently took her by the hand and guided her to the Witch of Life’s private quarters, and though you could no longer see or hear them, you knew what was going on in there.

It wasn’t the first time the two performed such things, either, and though you all attempted to warn her, refusing to get close even as the “human” smiled and waved to you, Feferi was still heartbroken as the girl—Jade, you thought her name was—withered away.

She asked your permission to gift Jade with immortality.

You told her that you were sorry, so fucking sorry, but no. Humans were not meant to live with the undying, and if this Jade was to become one of you herself, the horrorterrors would only eat away at her mind.

It was a very long time before Feferi could look you in the face again, and by that time, it had been centuries since she cradled the wrinkled, white-haired human in her arms. You would never forget the screams that rang through the halls of your palace that day, and you sincerely doubted anyone else would either.

And yet, the fools decided that it wasn’t lesson enough for them.

Feferi picked other people to sleep with, some from her planet, some from Sollux’s. She never grew quite as close to any of them as she had to Jade, but she still cried every time one died. Equius began to court the strange, beefy people from his world, and Aradia and Vriska frequented the more dubious parts of any city or town anywhere. Terezi had her fun where she could, Tavros had dainty little creatures constantly falling into his lap and tickling him happy, Gamzee loved to paint your walls with grand depictions of his artistic lovers, and Nepeta enjoyed chasing any up for it from the caves of her planet.

The only people who seemed to stay away from the citizens were Sollux, Kanaya, Eridan (which was just sad), and you.

Sollux and Eridan, of course, claimed to be too good for the peoples (whatever helped them sleep at night), and Kanaya . . . well, you were pretty sure Kanaya was very simply terrified of the idea of being hurt.

Which was ironic, considering she was the next to follow a human around like a lost puppy.

The new human was also a female, one with short, shining hair the color of the solar system’s shared star, purple eyes brimming over with intelligence and lips constantly spewing snark anywhere she went. Kanaya, of course, was so flushed for her she might as well have turned into a rust- or red-blood.

It was around this time that Terezi, too, found a human to pity, though this one was a male of the same hair color and astonishingly red eyes hidden beneath a pair of sunglasses, soul guarded by the impeccable poker face he wore like a shield.

The same cycle happened, of course. They had copious amounts of sex, they begged you to allow the humans immortality, and they sobbed and shook in your arms when their humans died. Unlike Jade, Rose and Dave—as that were their names—didn’t die of old age. They were murdered by a band of psychopaths that invaded their shared village in the middle of the day—no one in your group had even been awake to witness it.

Kanaya abstained, but Sollux, Eridan, and Terezi decided they were perfectly alright with having sex with the peoples after all, and they all visited the worlds at some point or another to fill a pail or three.

By this point you were . . . well, okay. You could admit it. You were lonely. The others were constantly speaking about and around companions, whole flurries and swarms of them that would drop to their knees for their leader at the snap of claws. Sure, you were a powerful figurehead superior to and leader of these peoples, but you were also still just a horny teenager at heart, so you decided to try this out.

Obviously, the world you visited was none other than your own.

You were actually surprised by the strange beauty of the place. The ground beneath you was pulsing, rising and falling in a gentle, firm rhythm, red as your innards and laced across its surface with bulging, pumping red veins. You could hear and feel the blood rushing beneath your feet, loud as a drum and distinct as water licking at your toes and ankles. A thick, pink haze choked the horizon from your view, hanging between you and the rest of the planet like a damp curtain, clumping in red beans on your exposed skin and staining your royal garments with crimson. The sky above was a violet-tinged black, dark and cloudy above, great chords of thick purple streaking through the rough surface to shine its ominous light down onto your land.

When you went to take a step, the floor beneath you squished and sunk inward, blood pounding against the sole of your shoe.

It was weird, so much so you drew your foot back with a hiss, fingers flexing in a reflexive motion, readying to rip and tear anything that might attempt to harm you. Of course, this was _your_ world, created for _you_ , so obviously it wasn’t going to hurt you and after a minute you dropped your guard, feeling like a total moron.

Wading through haze and puddles of blood and tissue, you eventually came to a circling of hives that were, believe it or not, cut straight from the bloody flesh of the ground, creating a crater around the village, the living shacks built with seeping, sticky blood and bouncing skin. They flopped and jiggled with the rise and fall of the fleshy floor beneath, but the residents didn’t seem to mind or have any concern over this matter, and simply carried on with their business.

These people were strange-looking as well, naked and red and skinny as they all were, their genders undetectable despite the lack of cover and their heads bald as anything else you had ever seen. Their eyes were various shades of pink, red, and purple, no pupils that you could see and their irises fading out into the white sclera in an ever-lightening boundary until it turned the color of milk. The rest of their body seemed normal enough: tentabulge sheaths, nooks, similar anatomy, blunt-toothed mouths and watery voices.

You approached them, and found them to be friendly. They were in awe of you, and seemed to know exactly who you were by instinct alone. It was easy enough to grab a few of them and take them somewhere private—you were pleased to see they, too, used pails—and then you covered their body with yours, and they shrieked their pleasure and worshipped your body and sobbed when you made an affectionate move.

Eventually you tired of your own people—you wanted someone who wouldn’t fall over themselves to impress you, so you asked Feferi’s permission to travel to her world and when you got it, curiously went to poke around a brilliantly blue and green planet.

It was lush, Feferi’s planet. Lush and beautiful and blooming and warm, a planet full of life, Vriska’s star easily seen with a glance up into the expansive, blue sky above.

You landed in a village with huts made from trees, humans laughing and running and dirty all around you, squishy and hot and so very pink. Every time you landed eyes on one, you couldn’t help but think, _They would die within seconds on Alternia,_ only this was not Alternia, and they had no reason to fight to live. Here, the humans could thrive peacefully, happily. And though they may be delicate, from the addictive ways your friends stalked the humans, you could bet their soft bodies made delicious pailings.

Some of the humans smiles and waved and hugged you as they ran by, but for the most part no one fell to their knees and attempted to pleasure you. You liked that. A lot.

Still, the humans were so very different from your own creatures. They were so varied in skin and hair and eye color, so happy and carefree despite the lightest of touches bruising their fragile exteriors, the quickest of slices opening chasms in the protective layer of their skin. With some many options, you couldn’t help but feel a little giddy standing among them, like a child on Perigree’s you combed greedy eyes over the crowd of screaming people, and you only stopped when you found _him._

He wasn’t anything special to look at, not compared to some of his neighbors and relatives. But it wasn’t so much his attractiveness—and he _was_ attractive, you’d give him that—that tugged you towards him. It was his dancing, alone and caught up in a miniature whirlwind you knew wasn’t provided by Tavros, gold bracelets flashing at his arms and ankles as he moved to the beat of the human instruments playing through the little town.Though not necessarily graceful, there was a certain power to his movements, a certain show of willful I-could-care-less attitude and confidence that made your mouth water to have that same body, those same moves, under you.

You approached him cautiously, warily, like a predator slinking ever closer towards its prey. The boy didn’t seem to notice you, which was both infuriating and oddly charming for reasons you couldn’t quite say. When you asked him to show you how to dance like he was, he smiled at you like the pair of you were old friends, placed his hands on his hips, and guided your body into waves of movement to match the music’s beat.

His fingers were silky and warm when they accidentally brushed across a naked strip of skin, and you were keenly aware of how easily it would be to break him, how you could readily lunge at him and crush him between your arms until his lungs were punctured by his own ribs or flat as Vriska’s bosom.

When you asked him to follow you home, he giggled and proclaimed you would need to catch him first. The fucker then took off _running._

You wouldn’t let such a good partner go easily, so you chased. You chased and felt adrenaline sing through your every vein and capillary, felt your pulse drumming a tempo through your skull and ears, but your eyes remained on the back of the human you desired. He would dodge behind bushes and trees at times, but you were always right there, snarling and pouncing and so _close to getting him_ but he would roll out of the way just in time every single time.

Fortunately for you, you eventually tackled him to the ground, and then your hands were under his clothes, skimming across soft human limbs, feeling the heat radiate off of his body in expensive waves. Unlike your people, this human tried desperately to hold back his noises and flushes whenever you did anything at all, and somehow that made every freed moan and pant that much more delightful to your sound flaps. Each little breathy sound sent a shiver of pleasure and want down your back, so much so that you could hardly hold yourself back and ended up biting him. Everywhere.

As it turned out, he really liked being bit. It was a good setup, really.

After, you realized you had never felt so hungry for another round with one individual before. The human—John, he said his name was—wasn’t quite ready for another pailing with someone as superior as you, so you allowed him to lay naked, draped across your body and hot everywhere the two of you were touching, panting into your collarbone, his glasses crooked on his face. You ran clawed fingers through his hair as you waited for him to regenerate or whatever the fuck he needed to do, purring absently. He didn’t comment on it, but a few minutes later he made a strange sputtery noise you thought was probably an attempt at a purr.

You laughed. He blushed and hit you. It was nice.

Four buckets later, you were forced to bid John a “good night” and return to your own home, feeling both abuzz and disappointed to have left. Sollux only had to look at your face once before announcing to the entire room that you were now a total bucket whore. The assholes all but toasted in honor of your newfound promiscuity while you stood with your hands clenched and screaming at them to shut their damn protein chutes before you did it for them.

When the day slowly revolved away, your coon offering you the solstice of dreamless sleep, you gathered yourself together and returned to Feferi’s planet for another chance to defile the human.

You found him leaning back against a thick trunk to an unidentified tree (seriously, they all looked the fucking same. How were you supposed to know which type was which?), sitting on one of its obese roots, the dimness of twilight casting little light onto the thin legs exposed by the shortness of his breeches. John had an open book balanced in his lap, his tongue caught between his impossibly flawed teeth, penciling in something you couldn’t see.

He didn’t appear to notice your arrival, so you prowled closer, raking in his relaxed form, sun-bathed and earthly in the dying light of his star.

When he did finally look up, he actually squeaked, falling off the root he had taken as his seat, his book and pencil flopping down after him to smack him in his goofy face. You, of course, did the gentlemanly thing and laughed your ass off at his expense. He threw a pencil at you and yelled that it wasn’t funny. You growled and tackled him.

Suffice to say, sex happened. Again.

When it was over and the two of you once again lay tangled together, naked and heated from your intercourse, you admired the far-off stars visible from Feferi’s planet, surprised you could see them at all. John cuddled on top of you again, his face pressed into your neck, breathing slow and deep with his fingers curled into your discarded shirt, abandoned beside the two of you.

“Karkat,” he breathed.

“Hmm?”

“Did you come back just to see me again?”

Well, it sounded a bit more romantic when he phrased it like that, but when you looked down at his slightly red face, you had a feeling he already knew exactly why you came back. “Yeah.”

His soft, clawless fingers—the ones not caught in your shirt—traced circles gently into your skin, absently, like he didn’t even realize he was doing it. Those big blue eyes were averted away from you, lips working like he was trying to parse out how to say what was on his mind. “Are . . . are you going to come back again?”

You didn’t like where this was going. You didn’t like it at all, even though you knew he had a point here, knew that yes, you probably would succumb and come back here just for him, just to touch him and kiss his stupid face and feel his warm frangibleness around you. Still, you hated how he pointed this out, how it was so utterly _honest_ and how weak-willed you felt in the face of such sharp truth. “. . . Yeah.”

At this point, you expected John to make some kind of comment or noise, something that would make you feel even more ashamed and aggravated than you already did. Instead, he made a little dorkish sound of delight and _nuzzled_ you. “Okay.”

Fuck. Shit fuck fire. Who told this little fuckface that he was allowed to be cute, because it certainly wasn’t you.

But as it was predicted, you only came back to see him the very next day. And the next. And the next. Soon, every time one of the little villagers spotted you they would immediately tell you a) they didn’t know where John was or b) where they thought John was. Soon, you were introduced to the freaky same-species lusus John had told you about, an older human with a nice hat and a polite, lusus-like manner about him that had you both a little wary and relieved.

Soon, you invited John to visit your shared hive with the others. All but Vriska treated him as they treated the other humans, pretending he wasn’t there, with Kanaya, Feferi, and Terezi shooting you knowing, hard looks. You ignored them in favor of exploding at Vriska every time she so much as touched your human.

John loved the palace, and he loved when you dressed him in the golden clothes of your section, though he always became flustered under the onslaught of luxury and gifts offered to him. You, yourself, liked seeing the colors on him, and may or may not have taken a fiendish delight in slipping him a piece of cloth that was actually yours, especially when he actually gave in and wore it.

Half a sweep hadn’t yet passed when he asked you, lying across the top of you like normal, for once not after the two of you had pailed, if you loved him. You didn’t know how to reply, so you didn’t say anything. He didn’t ask you again that day.

Sometimes you would descend to John’s village and help him herd the little group of  wriggler-sized yellow salamanders around, or playfully chase him through fields and woodlands with the intent of ravishing him once—and you would eventually, that was without a doubt—you caught him. Every now and then you would allow him to drag you to some place or area he had discovered and wanted to show you, and in truth, all those places were gorgeous, but you thought John was a little more excited over them than made any sense. He lived on a beautiful planet, after all, one would think he would be used to its own beauty.

One time John asked you to show him a place. A place like nothing he had ever seen, a place that was as much you as anything else. So you took him to your strange planet, and the whole way there your stomach churned and you babbled about how he shouldn’t freak out and how it was a bit different and ugly but it was yours, you guessed. But John didn’t freak out He gushed, he awed over it, he poked the ground and tried to talk to your residents, all who fell to their knees at the sight of the pair of you. He did wrinkle his nose upon seeing the hives, asked if they had hurt the planet by doing that. You just shrugged, because in all honesty, you didn’t really know.

When you took him back home, he wholeheartedly thanked you verbally and physically, leaving you hot and buzzing and happy you had taken the chance to take him to your planet.

It had been a few sweeps, and the time was illustrated by the height John had acquired over the course of your visits. There were lines printed into the skin around his eyes and mouth, imprints of the many times he smiled and laughed over the ages, and every now and again dark hair would spread across the bottom half of his face, marking the passing of a few days or so.

It was then Sollux asked you if you pitied the human. You snarled at him, but you didn’t know what to say, how to explain the way your body remembered John’s so well, how your nerves caught on fire every time the two of you touched, how John’s grin was forever etched into the back of your eyelids to haunt you with every blink and nightdream.

Most of all, you didn’t know how to tell if this was pity or something else.

A sweep later, John told you if it wasn’t for you, the village would have expected him to get married. Marriage was a strange concept, a human one, where two quadrantmates promised to never separate and bound their spiritual bodies to each other in the hopes of accomplishing this. He also informed you when his little town decided on his and the rest of his generation’s jobs. John was given the role of shepherd. Given his talent with the small animals, it suited him.

A decade passed, and the wrinkles in John’s skin became more pronounced, his dark head catching a shining silver hair here and there. His muscles were still strong, but they had weakened by this point, and his body became slower to heal. And yet, despite his weakened state, age had only served to make him more handsome, made his skin darker with the kisses of the starlight and his eyes brighter with emotion.

Kanaya and Terezi and Feferi would all shoot you sympathetic looks when you woke up each time and wandered to the fat orb of Feferi’s world. You growled at them, but they would not cease their looks. Sollux and Eridan would shake their heads at you, and Vriska would tease and mock you to no end.

It was fine. You didn’t care. They could think whatever they wanted.

Around this time, John began to worry about how old he was. You would never admit it to him, but you did as well. You remembered the signs of death that appeared on the bodies of Dave, Rose, and Jade, and you could now see them scrawled across John like a curse. You hated it, you feared it. Every time the thought passed your mind of him dying, of no John, your bloodpusher failed to beat for a nanosecond and your breath caught so hard in your throat that tears would sting your ocular orbs.

But you would not give him immortality. No, you would not change your mind on that one. The lifting of death would only kill his weaker soul instead of his body, and not only could you not allow that, you, yourself, would not be able to bear it.

When John’s hair was streaked with gray and silvers, he asked you once again if you loved him. You told him that yes, yes you did, and you were so fucking sorry you hadn’t told him sooner. He told you he forgave you.

You almost wished he wouldn’t.

This marked his Sunset Years, as the village called them. His lusus, who had so desperately held on to life until this point, died in this time. It was a long, long night that you held John as he shook and sobbed, but not once did you let him go, and not once did you cease trying to sooth him in some way, whether it was petting his head or whispering sweet nothings or kissing everywhere you could reach.

Feferi then asked you if you would like for her to give John immortality. She was serious when she asked, you could see it glittering in her fuchsia eyes, and while your heart went out to her, to her strength because here she was offering the very thing you refused to give her, you told her no. No matter how much it hurt, you would not break John in that way.

Eventually, all of John’s hair turned a beautiful silver. His skin withered, brown and frail and worn, and you kissed every raised vein and every line on his flesh that you could reach.

He whispered to you, in the morning light, that he did not want to die.

Your eyes stung, you bloodpusher grew heavy and tight in your chest cavity, but you said nothing.

From then on, every morning you would whisk him to your respiteblock, and though at one time you would have had him naked and writhing every second of your time together, now you were more content to cuddle and kiss and caress. You whispered “I love yous” into his fingers, wrists, ankles, calves, thighs, hips, stomach, ribs, biceps, shoulders, back, neck, collar, breast, forearms, elbows, face, ears. You told him the stories of you and your friends creating his universe, your universe, told him tales of the humans named Jade, Dave, and Rose. Told him about the silly things Gamzee would do, of your past moirallegiance, told him about Alternia and troll culture.

He always went quiet and listened, all the way until the day you looked over at him in the middle of one of your sentences, your body curled around his, and found his eyes glassy and . . . and dull. Lifeless.

Dead.

 


End file.
